police bill pushed
Advocates want the House to cut qualified immunity
Clergy and labor advocates rallied on the steps of the State House on Friday in favor of a police reform bill, urging House members to follow the Senate’s lead in cutting into qualified immunity for cops.
“We are now looking for the House of Representatives to do at least what the state Senate has done, or go even further,” said Rahsaan Hall, a Cambridge minister who runs the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.
Hall, joined by other religious leaders from the Greater Boston Faith Organization and representatives from the SEIU service employees union, called on the House to include what the Senate passed: a police officer licensing system, a ban on choke holds and more.
“Probably one of the most important demands that needs to be addressed by this Legislature is reforms to a legal doctrine called ‘qualified immunity,'” Hall said, referring to the doctrine that makes it difficult to sue individual government employees. “For too long, this legal doctrine has allowed officers engaged in unlawful illegal and unconstitutional conduct to escape civil liability.”
Rev. Willie Bodrick II, of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, said if the speakers’ words did not move them, then the thousands of people who protested in Franklin Park in early June should.
“Our protests must not just be screams, but our protests must become policy — and we can’t claim to be progressive if our policies don’t match the rhetoric that we speak each and every day,” Bodrick said.
The bill passed in the wee hours of Tuesday morning by the Senate does limit qualified immunity, drawing heavy pushback from police groups.
In response to the advocates’ calls in front of the State House on Friday for reform, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association tweeted, “Talk about disingenuous. Rashaan Hall (sic) should know better and it’s alarming that he doesn’t. Qualified Immunity does not protect bad cops. Never has. Never will. It protects ALL public employees who work hard and play by the rules.”
The House leaders continue to work on a bill, and accepted comment until Friday. The Massachusetts Coalition of Police, which represents 4,300 officers in 157 cities and towns, said in testimony on Friday that it supports many of the reforms proposed to improve policing.
The union disagrees with the Senate’s proposed makeup of a 15-member committee that would oversee officer certification, its approach to due process for police officers facing disciplinary action, and the Senate changes to qualified immunity.
MassCOP calls those changes “no less than a hostile act against more than 16,000 officers across the Commonwealth and their families … with collateral impact on thousands of other public servants who will lose important protections from unreasonable, unpredictable and nuisance lawsuits over good-faith actions on the job.”